Luca Missoni (born 1956), artistic director of the Missoni Archive, has been infatuated with the moon since childhood, observing it through a telescope and collecting maps and books about the moon, and, over the past 20 years, incorporating it into his artistic research as a photographer.

The exhibition featured Missoni's grids of individually framed prints in a manner reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher, as well as larger single prints and a selection of new works in which several colored moon images have been composed into one collage. A selection of new drawings of the moon on paper was also presented for the first time.  

The result is Missoni's personal interpretation of our closest heavenly body, and a journey through his lifelong appreciation of Earth's satellite. 

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Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce Silver. Skate. Seventies., an exhibition of photographs by Hugh Holland featuring the photographer’s archive of black and white images, including some of his earliest photographs documenting the rise of the California skateboard revolution in the 70s.

On a late afternoon in 1975, a young photographer named Hugh Holland drove up Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Los Angeles and encountered skateboarders carving up the drainage ditches along the side of the canyon. Southern California was experiencing a major drought. Emptied suburban swimming pools became evaporated playgrounds for kids with wheels—kick-starting an explosive skateboarding scene. "It spread like wildfire all over Southern California," says photographer Hugh Holland. "I know it happened in other parts of the world too, but California felt like the center of it all." Immediately transfixed by their grace and athleticism, he knew he had found an amazing subject. Although not a skateboarder himself, for the next three years Holland never tired of documenting skateboarders surfing the streets of Los Angeles, parts of the San Fernando Valley, Venice Beach and as far away as San Francisco and Baja California, Mexico.

Hugh Holland: Silver. Skate. Seventies., adds a more raw, spontaneous understanding to Holland’s well-known color photographs of the 1970’s skating scene. Though now he is most closely associated with his later work in color, the artist began his photographic documentation of the skateboard revolution shooting in black and white. Holland shot these negatives while experimenting with new ideas and often for his own enjoyment. These early black and white images were in many ways the genesis for his later color works—providing us with a rare glimpse behind the creative curtain.
 
Hugh Holland (b. 1942, United States) had no formal training in photography prior to picking up a camera in 1968 after returning from a trip to Spain. He made a dark room and began shooting everything around him, particularly people. 
 
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Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition with Luca Lupi.

Aldo Sestini wrote in his 1963 work Il Paesaggio (The Landscape) that the Italian “landscape acquires higher interest and offers more spiritual pleasure when it is observed by those who are able to recognize the compositional elements, the peculiar variety and the natural and human factors that contributed to form it.” Landscapes brings together a selection of works from an ongoing series by Italian photographer Luca Lupi, who rises to Sestini’s challenge with his interrogation of the evolving relation between ancient and modern, and organic and inorganic forces in defining contemporary Italian identity and the regional landscapes that so profoundly shape it.

In capturing the geological and architectural diversity of the bel paese, Lupi invites a modular reading of the Italian coastline, the compositional consistency of his images permitting a continuous and endlessly reconfigurable sequence where built and natural elements are flattened and reduced to their formal properties. Toying with the viewers’ sense of scale, a sublime and boundless sky nearly consumes each frame, transforming the unique details of each landscape into exquisite ornaments; a majestic Tuscan terrace mirrors a strip of narrow white beach, while the cathedrals and cemeteries of ancient Venice appear not grand and imposing but as delicately hewn as tiny watercolors.

Born in Pontedara, Pisa in 1970, award-winning Italian photographer Luca Lupi currently lives and works in Fucecchio, Florence. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. He won the Photomed Festival 2017 for his Landscapes series, and has had the work presented in solo exhibitions including Landscapes, Emon Photo Gallery, Tokyo (2016); Still, Cardelli & Fontana artecontemporanea, Sarzana (SP, 2016); Infinito Presente, Sincresis Arte, Empoli (FI, 2015); Spazi, Museo di Fucecchio, Florence (2014); Landscapes, Anne Clergue Galerie, Arles, France (2014); Viewpoint, Le Murate, Florence (2011).

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Hiroshi Watanabe (b. 1951) is a Japanese artist based in California. Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, Watanabe graduated from Nihon University in 1975 and received an MBA from UCLA in 1993. His first published collection was I See Angles Every Day (2007), depicting portraits of patients and scenes from San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. In 2009, Watanabe received a commission from the San Jose, California Museum of Art to document his perspective of the city’s Japantown. The work centered around artifacts from the Japanese internment camps established during WWII. He has since shown work in North Korea, Italy, North Carolina and Oregon. Watanabe won a Critical Mass Award from Photolucida in 2006 and received a grant from the Pollock-Kasner Foundation in in 2016.

Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce I Am Nothing, Valerio Spada’s first exhibition with the gallery.


I Am Nothing explores the Sicilian Mafia, telling the stories of some of its bosses and members who are fugitives from justice, together with the signs of its inexorable penetration into the fabric of society. In 2011, he produced a photo series called Gomorrah Girl, where the story of the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra, is told through the lives of young women.



Since this success, Valerio Spada has continued researching organized crime, focusing on the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra. The result is a project based on a narrative approach that differs from the traditional canons of reportages, combining different subject matter and media. As a result, in this exhibition you will find:scenes of everyday life, which convey how deeply this phenomenon is involved in everyday behaviors; carefully posed portraits, which allow us to come close to the leading figures in this universe in a moment of dialogue; a video of the capture of long time fugitive Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, filmed by the police; a large image of Giovanni Brusca giving evidence in a high-security courtroom at the Milan courthouse; the photographic documentation of the Bible found in Provenzano’s hideout, full of codes which the FBI and eminent theologians believe could conceal the last secrets of the mafia.


As Roberto Saviano wrote: “I am a Mafia boss but I am nothing. I make decisions on life and death but I am nothing. I am nothing because I am just like you. I move among you. I live among you. I believe in your God. I use the same objects that you do, but in a different way. I use my typewriter to write messages of death. The photo series by Valerio Spada, I am nothing, is deeply disturbing because it shows the silence that surrounds the mafia, the capacity of organized crime to penetrate our daily lives and our total inability to defend ourselves against it.”


Valerio Spada (b. 1972, Milan) is an Italian photographer living in New York. In 2011 Gomorrah Girls won the Photography Book Award Now as best book of the year. Gomorrah Girl was included by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in The Photobook: A History Volume III, published by Phaidon, and it is now part of the Beneicke Rare Books & Manuscripts collection at Yale university. In 2013 Valerio Spada was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to finance his continuing research into organized crime in Italy.

I Am Nothing is the book resulting from his latest project and was published in 2017 by American publisher Twin Palms.

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Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce The Critical Zone— its’ first exhibition with Katherine Wolkoff.

In The Critical Zone, Wolkoff presents new landscape photographs that describe the geological, botanical and zoological markings visible in “the critical zone,” earth’s permeable layer which extends from the tops of the trees to the bottom of the ground water. Scientists argue that this zone—where rock, soil water and air meet—will characterize the future environmental health of the earth.

Like a scientific researcher, Wolkoff travels to public lands throughout the United States to photograph the landscape of the critical zone. She uses a range of techniques from the 4x5 view camera to a flatbed scanner, utilizing subjective post-production techniques that expand the photography beyond science. The work in this show is notable that it is her first body of black and white photographs.

The elements collected for these photographs show millions of years of geologic change—from evidence of sliding glaciers to traces of disappeared oceans. Today, these places are being affected in new ways due to rising temperatures and the effects of climate change in our current epoch, the Anthropocene. Black sand is churned up by hurricanes, invasive insects consume trees, and icebergs melt in plain sight.

The photographs in The Critical Zone leave the viewer unsure about where they stand, the scale and point of view are vertiginous. It is also unclear what the future holds for the state of the natural world. 

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Aaron Morse is as influenced by the geography, history and mythology of the Southwest as he is by the language of advertising, collage, and comics. Using subjects such as American Colonial history, 19th century Romantic literature, travel and leisure propaganda, nature guides, hunting, whaling, and 20th century politics, among other phenomena, Morse’s compositions combine elements of these in colorful and complex layers. The results are akin to epic illustrations or surreal, alternate worlds where space is ambiguous and tumultuous. His large paintings and watercolors are exceptional for their technique, and recall art forms ranging from Chinese landscape painting and Japanese woodblock prints to drawings by outsider artist Henry Darger and the Beat era collages of Jess. Ecology is a major concern for the artist, whose work is based simultaneously in both reality and fantasy.

- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art

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In the project space is the debut exhibition of Polly Penrose. Penrose began taking photographs when she was a teen. She would aim the camera towards herself investigating her emotions, body and identity. This same impetuous became her practice as seen in her highly evocative, whimsical image making.
 
Penrose uses her body as her subject interacting with objects such as paper, yoga mats, balloons and other everyday elements. Her face is always obscured and her identity changes, in every picture she becomes an integral part of the landscape or an object. She is molded into her own muse.

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Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce its’ sophomore exhibition with Delphine Burtin.
 
“Our reality is merely a controlled hallucination, reined in by our senses,” Anil Seth, cognitive and computational neuroscientist, University of Sussex, UK
 
In her second show with the gallery, Delphine Burtin brings together four new bodies of work, all visual explorations using forms found in nature such as harvested plants or a subject as essential as folded paper. Burtin presents us with photographic work that is a study around the object: it’s geometry and the space it inhabits, forcing us to question our relationship to the tangible.
 
The artist’s treatment of her subject in muted light, decomposed space and the loss of time creates a visual pun where the elements of the “real” only emerge in the final image. The invisible nature of the photographed subject becomes the final protagonist, our minds are lost in the reality the artist gives us. We recompose the object following the visual breakdown she presents. Burtin goes beyond the creation of the image. She looks to the sculptural dimension as her building blocks and the experience of the viewer as the final touchstone between the constructed interior world: the picture space and its’ relationship to an objective reality.
 
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